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Last year when gold and silver prices jumped, I wound up selling almost all of my gold and a big chunk of my silver. But the buyback prices for some silver coins was not that great and I thought I could make more by selling them on eBay. Prices have fluctuated some since then, but are still pretty high. But the premiums dealers charge on silver have really, really gone up. It used to be you could get US silver coins for $3-5 over the spot price of silver and now it is more like $16 or $17 per ounce (the spot price is around $28 right now, so that is more than a 50% markup!).

The coins I wanted to sell are 5 ounce silver America the Beautiful quarters. They look just like quarters but are the size of drink coasters. I came in late, so didn’t get the early ones, then I paid anywhere from $90-$115 for each and got most of the states before the prices went crazy last year and I stopped buying. Now dealers are charging about $226 for a new one from the mint (the mint doesn’t sell these directly, just dealers), and still can’t keep them in stock, but the buyback price is only $153. That’s for $140 worth of silver. So the premium the dealer pays you is only $2 per ounce, while the premium they sell for is $17 per ounce. This is why it is hard to make money on silver. It would be better if you could do a private party sale and meet someone in the middle, but I don’t know any silver collectors and wouldn’t try Reddit or Craigslist for something like this (maybe a silver forum where buyers and sellers get ratings based on past transactions). I have put off selling on eBay because it is just a pain to take pictures, post listings, etc. Then you have to deal with people who may complain that the coins aren’t pristine or something and file a claim or want to return the coin. Also eBay isn’t cheap. Their current deal is they let you list items for free (if you do it their way), but you pay 12.5% of the sale price to them. That covers listing fees as well as finance fees from PayPal or credit cards.
Continue reading “Selling Silver on eBay”

I started contributing to my Roth IRA in 2004 and have blogged about it frequently. It was a great way to park savings I wasn’t going to spend anyway and let it grow without ever paying taxes on the gains. Last year I retired and I still don’t need the money yet, so not only did I not take any money out, I figured I should continue contributing. Then I found out this week that IRA’s are only supposed to be funded with earned income and my pension and investment income is not considered earned. Of course I had contributed as soon as I could, which was January 4. The IRS is somewhat reasonable about this, but would charge a 6% penalty on any amount I contributed beyond what I was supposed to every year that I don’t correct it. So as long as I could reverse that contribution by the end of the year, I wouldn’t owe a penalty. I called Fidelity to see what I should do and how to take the money out. Long story short, people do this all of the time and there is an online form you can fill out. The wrinkle is if your contribution has increased in value, they have to return that to you as well, so since the market is up this year, instead of $7,000, they are returning $7,220. And I will have to pay taxes on that $220 as if it were income. That was a nice tax shelter and I will keep money in my Roth IRA account for as long as I can. One of Mom’s advisors said Roth money is the last money you should use, I guess because it is tax free.

As usual, I watched the Oscars this year. But this was a very, very different broadcast. First, not a great year for movies since a lot of movies were postponed with the theaters being closed most of the year. Second, again due to Covid but with things sort of opening safely, they couldn’t have the usual big Oscars, so they had it at a smaller venue with far fewer attendees, and some people at different places remotely (usually venues, not their houses, like some other award shows). That was nice that they could still dress up and be together even if it wasn’t at the Oscars. There seems to have been a pre-Oscars show with some music numbers, but there were no songs played through in the main broadcast and none performed live, since Quest Love acted as a house DJ. I feel like performing all of the nominated songs can be a bit of a time waster, especially when it isn’t a strong category (maybe they could do one or two if they are good). For some reason they also changed the order of the awards. I started recording the show before watching and maybe an hour after the broadcast started but before watching, I checked on Wikipedia to see who had won the early awards, thinking someone had vandalized the page by putting the director of Nomadland as the winner, since that is usually one of the last awards. Not this year. Director often goes to the same as Best Picture, but not always, so it kind of takes some suspense out early about Best Picture, but I do like that they spread out the awards. I still think Best Picture should have gone last instead of Best Actress and then Best Actor, which really backfired on them since Anthony Hopkins won the final award and he wasn’t there or online. So then it was just over.
Continue reading “2021 Oscars”

A couple of days ago Buddy Baer was barking while looking out the window, which is not that unusual, but I will usually take a look and see what it is. There was nobody out there. But the wind was blowing pretty hard and it is peak pollen season, so there were these clumps of flower stuff that had fallen from oak trees. Those were blowing around and as they moved in the wind, kind of looked like squirrels or some kind of animal rolling around. There was definitely a correlation between movement of these tumbleweeds and Buddy’s barking. It got me wondering what that stuff is called and whether they were really from oaks or not. They are male flowers (pollen producers) from oaks called “catkins.” I don’t think I’d ever heard that word before, which is surprising since they come out every year. But Buddy must have known that it was something that sounded like “cat” since he definitely does not like cats.

I have been making coffee in my Aeropress for 11 years now. Over five years ago I started grinding my own coffee beans with a grinder Mom gave me for my birthday. I usually get Eight o’ Clock whole bean Columbian coffee from Publix when they have it on sale for half off (which is at least once a month). It is really cheap that way, but good I think. Every now and then I try something different to make sure I’m not missing out too much.

I collect rewards points through Kellogg’s Family Rewards program, which lets me get free children’s books sometimes, or $5 Best Buy gift cards, and some other stuff. I eat a lot of cereal so I build up a lot of points. Recently they had a deal where if you bought 3 boxes of Special K cereal (which I buy all the time) you could get a 12-pack of K Cups coffee pods (a $7 value!). I don’t have a Keurig coffee maker and don’t really want one because of the cost and waste of the pods, but it was free. The brand is Green Mountain Nantucket Blend (mostly African and Indonesian, I think) and I have been really anticipating getting the coffee since I ordered it in January. The box arrived in the mail today. I opened one of the pods and put the ground coffee into the Aeropress to make a cup of coffee. Lately I have been making iced coffee with milk and sugar, so I made that. It seemed a little weak. I measured the weight of the empty pod and compared that to a full pod and found out there are 9.7 grams of coffee in a pod (looking later, the box says 9.4 g, so that is about right). The Aeropress came with a scoop for coffee which is 3 tablespoons. I measured the weight of my usual one scoop of beans and it was 14.7 grams. So no wonder the pod coffee tasted weak, it was using about 2/3 as much coffee. I could use two pods, but that would probably be too strong, or at least stronger than I am used to. I might try using 2 pods to fill one Aeropress scoop so I could do a better comparison and toss or save the leftover.

I could probably get a better deal on K cup pods, for instance Eight o’Clock pods are only $5.99 instead of $6.99 for Green Mountain at Kroger. And the 50% off price at Publix is very good (actually it looks like when Publix sells bags for Buy One Get One Free, they do the same for the 12-pack of pods), so if instead I compare the pod price to the current price of a bag at Kroger, $4.99, I get 21 servings per bag or $0.24 per cup using bagged coffee. The Eight o’ Clock pods would be $0.50 each, but I would need to make a smaller cup of coffee to get about the same strength. A more honest comparison would determine how many 9.7 g servings (one pod) are in a bag, which would be 32 or $0.16 per cup for the bag coffee, about a third of the cost for the same kind of coffee (though I pay a few cents for a highly overpriced Aeropress filter). So I don’t think I will switch from the pods, but I am happy to try the Nantucket blend, which uses different beans than I am used to.